Hitch-hiking lemurs

Editor’s note: As Creation magazine has been continuously published since 1978, we
are publishing some of the articles from the archives for historical interest, such as this. For teaching and
sharing purposes, readers are advised to supplement these historic articles with more up-to-date ones suggested in the Related Articles below.

Madagascar is a large island about 400 kilometres (250 miles) off the coast of Africa.
It contains many species of lemurs (which are classified with apes, monkeys and
men as primates), both fossil and living. The largest, at 400 pounds (180 kilograms),
would be about the size of a modern adult gorilla.

It used to be thought that the lemurs got to Madagascar before the island broke
off from Africa. But, to be consistent with the evolutionary time-frame, evolutionists
now have to assume that Madagascar was in its present place before these creatures
arrived.

So how did they cross this huge stretch of deep ocean?

For evolutionists, this poses a similar problem to that which is often used against
creationists—that is, how could animals, especially large mammals, cross stretches
of water in post-Flood migration? Land bridges in an ice age would solve many problems
for both sides, but not all.

In the case of Madagascar, no such answer appears possible, and we are now told
that for the ancestors of today’s lemurs, ‘the only possible means of
access to Madagascar was by “rafting”: floating across the Mozambique
Channel from Africa on matted tangles of vegetation.’

Some of these lemurs were slow-moving and slothlike. Their journey as ocean passengers
could have taken much less time than by land.

Of course, if creationists had said that 400-pound mammals hitched a ride across
hundreds of miles of open sea on huge floating islands, it would have been ridiculed
as special pleading.

The reality of such transport possibilities is a valuable concession by evolutionists
in any future discussion of how animals dispersed after Noah’s Flood.

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